In his 'A week with...' series, Justin has used PC-BSD 1.3 this week and is sharing his experience. In other news, the PC-BSD team unveiled a sneak peek of the new look of the software installation wizard.

1. On second cd you'll find OpenOffice.org 2.1 not 2.4 as stated in this article (looks like he got second iso from mirror that was not synced at the moment he downloaded it)
2. Portsnap is FreeBSD standard application, not PC-BSD one (PC-BSD have just front-end for it).
3. He talks about BPM and Kports but didn't mention portinstall/portupgrade.
4. Portsnap don't stall- it downloads over 40MB or ports image over slow internet connection (PPPoE in his case)- just have to wait and be patient.
5. About OpenOffice.org MIME types- first time when you doubleclick on some openoffice file you'll see choose application menu- select OpenOffice(whatever you want) and select "remember application". Next time it would open your document with your favourite application. I know this is small issue and this would be sorted out in next release.
6. Startin PBI-s can't be so slow- eg. OpenOffice.org got no KDE dependencies and loads GTK and friends anyway.
7. Of course there is no graphical way of removing unused applications (Never heard of it in KDE- except PBI deinstallation) but you can remove them from menus with menu editor. Just press right mouse button on menu and press "Edit Menu", then remove.
8. iXsystem didn't bought PC-BSD project, they just bought PC-BSD trademark- project stays BSD licensed and mostly volunteer driven.
9. Launching PBI install files from external drives was crippled in initial 1.3 release, due to "noexec" mounting option hardcoded into HALd (Now it's removed in 1.3.01). HALd have various problems with FreeBSD USB system but I hope those annoyances would be sorted out in couple of months if not faster.

PC-BSD is first to use latest KDE and various technologies that is never used on FreeBSD and can help FreeBSD and KDE FreeBSD projects with testing, bugreports, fixes and suggestions for upcoming releases. We (PC-BSD Team) are working on enhancements/bugfixes and you can expect only stabler, faster and more polished future releases.